Hunter Killer (5 page)

They stood together by the cab at the south end of the street.

‘He going to be all right?’ Ripley asked, pointing at Barker’s receding silhouette.

‘Flesh wound,’ Danny told him. ‘Might have to use his left hand to spank the monkey for a while, that’s all.’

Spud looked meaningfully over at the corpse of the man Danny had wasted. ‘You gave that fella’s mouth a good rinse out with his nine-milli,’ he said. ‘What was all that about?’

For an uncomfortable moment, Danny remembered the rage that had taken him over.

‘Bad breath,’ he muttered. ‘Got a thing about it.’

Spud raised an eyebrow at the insufficient response, then nodded towards the arm of Danny’s North Face jacket. ‘You’ve still got a piece of the bastard’s brains on your sleeve,’ he said, as if he were pointing out a ketchup stain to a kid.

Danny shrugged. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The headshed want us out of here. Let’s go.’

They put their heads down, and walked silently away from the flashing lights and the scene of devastation they’d created. Their own vehicle was an unmarked white Transit van parked up two blocks away. Three minutes later they were climbing into the back, their coats dripping rainwater over the metal floor. They each had a holdall with a change of clothes, so they stripped out of their wet gear and pulled on dry jeans and T-shirts, leaving the wet, bloody garments sprawled over the vehicle’s floor.

Ripley took the wheel. Spud sat next to him in the middle seat, with Danny by the passenger window. They eased slowly away. After a couple of minutes they came to the police cordon, but the armed officer recognised their vehicle and waved them through. A minute later, they were driving down Lewisham High Street. Danny wiped the condensation away from the inside of his window and stared out.

The pavements were empty, but it wasn’t just because of the driving rain. There was unease on the streets. He’d been in London after 7/7, and there’d been a similar feeling then. If anything, it was worse in the wake of the Paddington bomb. The death count had been higher – last thing Danny heard, the number of fatalities had exceeded a hundred – and people were scared. Everyone knew someone who knew somone who’d been affected. Barker had a good mate in A Squadron, young bloke called Hancock, whose brother had been on the train and hadn’t made it. Hancock had been offered compassionate leave but had turned it down. Wanted to be around to do his bit as and when the time came. As they passed Lewisham station, Danny saw a group of four armed police guarding the entrance. The sight was supposed to put the public at their ease. Danny wondered if it didn’t have the opposite effect.

Spud switched the radio on. ‘Bat out of Hell’ by Meatloaf blasted out of the speakers. Spud turned it up even louder. ‘I fucking love this one!’ he shouted over the music, and he started singing along tunelessly. If there was tension on the streets, the inside of the Transit was a little cocoon of released adrenaline. It didn’t matter how many times you found yourself in a firefight, the heady mixture of relief and exhilaration when it was over never got old.

Meatloaf’s final chords died away. There was a chirpy Radio 2 jingle that grated on Danny’s ears, then a news bulletin. ‘The number of fatalities from the bombing at Paddington station last Friday has reached 107. Buckingham Palace have today confirmed that Orlando Whitby, fiancé of Princess Katrina, is among the dead . . .’

Spud switched the radio off again. ‘Fucking sick of hearing about it,’ he said.

Ripley indicated right. ‘Still,’ he said. ‘That’s one for the Princess Di nutjobs to get their teeth into.’

‘Hey,’ Spud said. ‘Enough of the nutjob.’

Danny smiled. It sometimes seemed to him that there wasn’t a single member of the British public who
didn’t
think the SAS had killed Diana using some fiendishly elaborate plot cooked up by the establishment and sanctioned by the royal family. And there were even some guys in the Regiment itself who thought that way. Spud included. Where there was a conspiracy theory to believe in, Spud was always first on the bandwagon. Not Danny though. Those Diana rumours were entertaining, but in his opinion the world didn’t work that way. If somebody had wanted Diana dead, they’d have made the hit in a far more practical or covert way. Car chases under the Seine? Packs of paparazzi? Blinding flashes of light? No. There were too many variables. Too many things that could go wrong. Diana’s death was an accident, nothing more. And the same went for Orlando Whitby, whoever the hell he was: just one of the unlucky sods who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

‘Put your foot down, mucker,’ Spud said to Ripley. ‘Too late for the headshed to call a debrief tonight. Floor it down the M4, I might get to Karen Macshane’s gaff before she opens up her muff for some other little turd.’

‘Thought you were seeing that bird from Warham.’

‘Nah, she dumped me. Said I was always exaggerating.’

‘What,
you
?’ Ripley said with a grin.

‘I know – I was so surprised I nearly tripped over my dick.’ Spud started whistling ‘Bat out of Hell’ again, then stopped suddenly and turned to Danny. ‘Want to come, mucker? Reckon you could use a few jars – you know, chillax. You went a bit OTT with that dumb-ass back there.’

Danny stared out of the window again. ‘Don’t want to cramp your style, mate.’ He glanced sideways at Spud, who was giving him a piercing look. ‘Clara’s staying,’ he said. ‘Day off. I’d better . . .’

‘. . . get your rocks off with your posh bird. Yeah, yeah, ’nuff said, fella.’

Danny had two phones. One for work, one personal, and at the moment he was only carrying the work one. It rang. He looked at the screen: number withheld. This was an encrypted phone, and nobody had the number – so far as Danny knew – except the ops room back at base. ‘This could be interesting,’ he said. He accepted the call and put the handset to his ear.

Danny didn’t have the chance to say hello. The Regiment’s ops officer Ray Hammond was already barking down the phone at him. ‘Nice one, fellas. I send you down to the smoke to pick a lock, I end up with seven dead Cypriots, the worst case of suicide I’ve ever seen and half the fucking journalists in London trying to get past the police cordon.’

‘It went noisy,’ Danny said calmly.

‘
You’re fucking telling me it went noisy!
’ Hammond screamed so loudly that Danny had to move the handset a few inches from his ear. ‘The CO wants you and Spud in his office the second you get back.’

Spud, who had clearly heard the conversation as he was sitting so close to Danny’s phone, started mouthing swear words silently next to Danny, who tried to block it out and keep his concentration.

‘What does the boss want?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the ops officer said. ‘Perhaps he wants to know how one of your targets managed to accidentally shoot himself three times in the mouth. Get a fucking move on. You’re expected here in three hours.’

The phone line went dead. Danny stared at the handset, then turned to Spud. ‘Sorry mate,’ he said. ‘Looks like I’m your date for the night. CO’s called us in.’

Spud gave him a sick look. ‘You know what?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got millions of nerves in my body. How come that fucker Hammond manages to get on every single one of them?’

Three

The unit arrived back at RAF Credenhill at 03.30hrs. The car park was unusually full, the lights were on in all the squadron hangars and even the HQ building was lit up. Busy times. Danny was dog-tired. Even Spud had been nodding off on the motorway. As they pulled up in front of the main regimental HQ building, Danny elbowed him in the ribs. He pointed through the windscreen. The wipers were still flapping furiously, so they could make out the sight of Ray Hammond waiting for them just inside the main entrance.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ Danny said. Spud and Ripley grunted in agreement. They debussed, and ran across the courtyard up the steps to the HQ building.

Hammond had dark rings round his eyes and an even darker frown on his forehead. ‘Not you, Ripley,’ he said. ‘You can get the hardware back to the armoury. You and you’ – he pointed at Danny and Spud in turn – ‘follow me.’

They marched through the building. Company clerks were scurrying around in uniform, or sitting at computers taking phone calls. But they hardly saw any of the lads. There was barely a UK-based member of the Regiment that wasn’t out on the streets, fully tooled up and ready to assist the police in the event of a hard arrest being necessary. Half of B Squadron had been deployed to major shopping centres round the country. Only a few weeks previously, a bunch of Al-Shabaab militants had taken out a number of civilian targets in a Kenyan shopping mall. Word was that the security services were bricking themselves that there might be a repeat performance.

They walked in silence towards the area at its centre known as the Kremlin. The warning signs were on Hammond’s face, and even Spud didn’t venture any sarky comments. The Kremlin was where Johnny Cartwright, CO of 22SAS, had his office, opposite the briefing rooms and just down the corridor from the main ops room. Hammond raised his fist to knock on the door, but at that moment the door opened and a clerk walked out carrying an empty coffee cup. Hammond stepped inside. ‘They’re here, sir,’ he said.

‘Send them in, Ray. You can go home now.’

The ops officer looked a bit put out that he wasn’t invited into the meet. But he stood to one side and let Spud and Danny pass without a word. Seconds later, they were alone with the CO.

Danny liked Cartwright. As ruperts went, he was one of the better ones. True, Danny suspected that his past few months of humdrum, UK-based ops was a hundred per cent down to his CO keeping him out of the firing line since everything that had happened on his last major overseas op, but he had his reasons. Cartwright seemed to have a genuine concern for his men’s welfare. Not that he was touchy-feely – far from it – but he was always prepared to stand up for the guys. When Danny and Spud had returned from Syria with their mate Greg Murray, he’d insisted on being present at every debrief the authorities could throw at him. Whenever questions came up that Danny didn’t feel like answering – and there were plenty of those – the CO pulled rank and stonewalled the fuckers. And when it was clear that Greg’s injuries at the hands of the Syrian
mukhabarat
spelled an end to his time in active service, Cartwright had made sure he kept a desk job in Hereford on full pay. Danny would always be grateful for that.

Not that he’d ever say it to Cartwright. Nor would Cartwright want to hear it. Especially now. The CO had a face like thunder.

‘So what are we supposed to tell them?’ he demanded without any pleasantries.

Danny kept a poker face. ‘It was very weird, boss,’ he said. ‘The guy obviously didn’t want to be captured alive. Took his own life before we could nail him.’

‘Three times in the back of the throat?’

‘Like I say, boss. It was weird.’

Cartwright stared at each of them in turn, then shook his head as if he was dealing with a couple of particularly exhausting children. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said under his breath. ‘I’ll sort it out.’ He stood up from behind his desk. ‘You’re not here for a bollocking, anyway. Take a seat.’

They did as they were told.

‘You’re both being assigned to E Squadron,’ Cartwright said. ‘Effective immediately.’

Danny blinked, then glanced at Spud.

The existence of E Squadron was an open secret. You’d never find an SIS or Regiment representative acknowledging its existence. But it existed all right – a special, hand-picked cadre of operatives individually selected to carry out the more sensitive operations that the intelligence services deemed necessary. Back in the day they’d called it the Increment, or the RWW. Now, this covert unit took its pick from the cream of 22SAS, the SBS and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Danny knew they’d been active in Libya and North Africa, but even he had no firm knowledge of what they’d been up to. E Squadron was for the most experienced, the most comprehensibly vetted. The best.

‘For what it’s worth,’ Cartwright said, ‘I think it’s a fucking terrible idea. But you two were specifically requested by London about two and a half hours ago. Looks like your old mate Hugo Buckingham’s taken a shine to you.’

Danny couldn’t stop the contempt showing on his face. He’d neither seen nor heard from Buckingham ever since they’d got back from Syria, and he was glad to keep it that way. He was loathsome. Cowardly. Danny couldn’t trust him one bit, which made this sudden summons all the more suspicious. E Squadron operations generally took the guys to the hottest spots in the world, often to protect MI6 personnel. Danny wasn’t sure he could stomach another op babysitting that piece of shit.

Cartwright was talking again. ‘I don’t have a lot of details, but Buckingham’s part of a joint MI5/MI6/CIA task force following up the Paddington bomb. They need a covert team on the ground to help them. You’re it. You head to London tomorrow, meet with your police liaison. We’ve got a safe house being prepared for you as we speak. You stay in the capital for as long as they need you there. I don’t expect you’ll be back in Hereford for some time.’

‘Boss,’ Danny started to say, ‘this Buckingham guy, if he’d had his way Spud would be rotting at the bottom of a mass grave in Syria . . .’

‘Get over it, Black. I know your feelings about him, but the decision’s made. You can take it as read by me that there’s a ton of downward pressure from Whitehall at the moment. The security services will be feeling the heat and I guess you two must have impressed that little shit out in the Middle East. Take it as a compliment if it makes you feel better. Or not, as the mood takes you. A chopper will give you a quick lift to London at 08.00. You’ll have a vehicle waiting for you and you’re expected at Paddington Green Police station at twelve hundred. You’ll receive a further briefing then. Any questions?’